"The causes of truancy are complex and challenging, and today's figures show a welcome change in absence rates that have remained largely unchanged since records began in 1994.

"We are delivering the first sustained national strategy to deal with the problem, and I am hopeful that our behaviour and attendance strategy will contribute to a greater improvement in attendance rates for the current academic year.

"But parents and schools must join with us to make sure that every day in school counts."

Family holidays

The new statistics do not relate to individual children, however. What they show is the "percentages of half days missed " in the 2002/2003 school year up to and including 23 May.

Half days are counted because pupils are registered twice a day - for the morning and afternoon sessions.

Ministers have also appealed to parents not to exercise their right to take children out of school for up to 10 days a year, for instance for family holidays.

The figures show that authorised absences - where schools gave permission for children to be away - were running at 6.13%, 0.17 of a percentage point better than the year before.

And the change means that the key rate of unauthorised absence is still worse than it was when Labour came to power.

In 1996-97 the figure was 0.7%, and it has fluctuated up and down a little each year since.

Labour had aimed to reduce it by a third.

The shadow education secretary, Damian Green, said this was another failure by the government to meet its own targets on education - despite having spent more than £600m on truancy initiatives since 1997.

"Around 50,000 children are truanting on every school day and it is clear that for too many children what they learn at school is just not relevant," he said.

"Ministerial initiatives and large sums of taxpayers' money are visibly failing to solve this crisis. We need reform of the curriculum especially to strengthen vocational and technical learning."

Private schools worsening

In maintained schools, the average number of half days missed by pupils without permission was 15 in secondary schools and eight in primaries.

Of all pupils, more than a fifth of those in secondary school - 21% - were absent without authorisation at some stage. Fifteen per cent of primary school pupils were away.

The total figures include independent schools.

There, the rate of unauthorised absence is tiny - 0.11% or about 420 pupils - but did rise markedly last year. For the previous six years it had been 0.08% or 0.09%.

And the rate of authorised absence has gone up steadily between 1996-97 and last year from 3.64% to 4.02%.